Scientists have finally created what might be the only thing that can get meatheads to eat their veggies: protein lettuce.

By literally shooting pig genes into the chloroplasts of lettuce and tobacco cells, an international team of researchers were able to grow produce that contained the animal protein myoglobin, they report in a new study published in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science.

Is this the pathway to the next ridiculous protein-infused snack? (We’re looking at you, protein popcorn.) Not quite. Instead, the scientists say their findings could pave the way to weaning ourselves off of environmentally-destructive meat.

“Our study demonstrates, for the first time, that higher plants can stably produce myoglobin, one of the key proteins responsible for many of meat’s desirable properties,” study lead atuhor Alexia Groff, a plant biotechnology researcher at Imperial College London, told ScienceAlert. “This is very relevant at a time when the demand for sustainable food production platforms is greater than ever.”

To combine pig genes with plant DNA, the researchers used a machine called a biolistic particle delivery system, or a “gene gun.” The nickname is apt: it works by firing microscopic metal particles covered in genes into their target. (Biolistic, by the way, is a portmanteau of “biological ballistics.”)

The target, this time, were the chloroplasts of lettuce and tobacco seedlings. Because of their “bacterial ancestry and their high number of copies per cell,” Groff explained in a statement about the work, “chloroplasts are generally much better at making large amounts of protein than the cell nucleus.”

Their genetic bullets hit the bullseye. In followup tests, the seedlings showed they had incorporated the pig DNA into the chloroplast genome. When the plants grew into adulthood and produced seeds, their offspring still possessed the transferred genes.

In all, the lettuce and tobacco plants yielded about 800 mg and 810 mg of myoglobin protein per kilogram of their dry weight. That’s ten times less than beef, but because growing plants is far more efficient than raising animals, the tradeoff could be worth it.

“Plant cultivation is far more resource-efficient than livestock production; consequently, plant-derived myoglobin could achieve protein yields per hectare that rival — or even potentially exceed — those of animal agriculture,” the authors wrote in the study, “whilst also benefiting from substantially lower water use and greenhouse gas emissions.”

If this gets adopted at scale, these protein-infused plants could be dried up and be used to bolster the protein in plant-based meats.

Other researchers caution that the food still needs to be proven safe to eat and sustainable to produce, but are optimistic about the findings.

“This an important advance on earlier plant and algal research.  Demonstrating stable myoglobin production in plant chloroplasts, including in an edible crop, raises the possibility of using plants as scalable, low-input production platforms alongside microbial fermentation,” Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro, director of the ICL’s Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein, said in a statement. “In the longer term, this could diversify how and where these ingredients are produced.”

More on lettuce: Trump’s Explosive Diarrhea Scandal Is Getting Worse and Worse

The post Scientists Genetically Engineer High-Protein Lettuce appeared first on Futurism.

In terms of demoralizing the federal workforce and demolishing the public sector, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was a success.

In terms of actually saving money, though — its ostensible raison d’être — it was a dismal failure.

Musk vowed to slash $2 trillion in government “waste and fraud.” Then he lowered that target to $1 trillion, and behind the scenes reportedly promised Trump to save just a tenth of that figure. In the end, DOGE boasted on its website’s “Wall of Receipts” that it had saved around $215 billion — peanuts compared to its original promise.

But the actual amount of spending it slashed may be even lower than that. In a sweeping audit, the Government Accountability Office looked through the $110 billion that DOGE claimed it saved between January and July 2025, and found a trail of staggering incompetency that let loads of supposedly saved money fall through the cracks. That framing, though, could be too generous to Musk and his pimple-faced lackeys. You could also take the view that DOGE, in all likelihood, was deliberately cooking the books.

Per the GAO’s new report, released this month, DOGE claimed it terminated 13,476 contracts, but nearly 2,000 of them weren’t actually terminated. Spending-wise, about $27.4 billion of the purported savings came from these contracts that DOGE botched the terminations of.

The clumsy — or deceptive — bookkeeping didn’t end there. The receipts “includes leases identified for termination before [the group] was established,” the report states, as quoted by The Washington Post. And 108 of 264 of the leases it claimed it nixed “were already in process for termination.”

In all, the GAO found that over half of DOGE’s claimed $61 billion in contract savings couldn’t be verified or came from contracts that weren’t actually terminated. Similarly, 96 percent of the savings that it claimed came from grants couldn’t be verified by the accountability office, either.

Last August, an investigation by Politico found that of the $52.8 billion that DOGE had claimed to save by cancelling contracts at the time, its actual savings were closer to just $1.4 billion. To calculate how it saved money, DOGE dubiously used the maximum spending limit listed on the contracts it axed, figures that in practice are much higher than what the government ends up spending.

At the time, government procurement expert Jessica Tillipman told the outlet that the practice was akin to “taking out a credit card with a $20,000 credit limit, cancelling it and then saying, ‘I’ve just saved $20,000.'”

More on Elon Musk: Columbia Economist Baffled as to Why the Masses Aren’t Rising Up Against Elon Musk

The post Elon Musk’s Efforts to Cut Spending in the Government Were So Incompetent That It’s Shocking, Internal Analysis Finds appeared first on Futurism.

When you read the newspaper, does it read you back?

On Thursday, USA Today Co — formerly known as Gannett, the publisher of its eponymous newspaper USA Today— announced that it was partnering with the AI surveillance firm Palantir to monetize and gain “actionable intelligence” on its audiences, Nieman Lab reports.

The largest newspaper publisher in the nation’s partnership was revealed in its second quarter earnings call. After extolling Palantir’s AI-powered platform, USA Today CEO Mike Reed said that it would allow the paper to “build a common intelligence layer” on the data it collects on its readers.

“Every visit, every session, and every moment of attention creates a signal,” Reed told investors Thursday morning, as quoted by Nieman. “When we connect those signals, they become actionable intelligence that allows us to engage users more effectively and monetize those relationships faster and at much greater value.”

The optics of partnering with Palantir — a company that provides military targeting software and wields a vast surveillance panopticon — are undeniably touchy. It’s worked hand in hand with ICE, secretly providing the agency a tool that scours citizen’s Medicaid and other government data to create a map of people it could potentially deport. It also supplies the Israeli military with an AI battlefield decision-making tool that can analyze enemy targets for elimination.

Still, it’s unclear how much more invasive the USA Today’s partnership will be compared to the routine data gathering and audience analysis that websites typically perform. One example of what Palantir’s platform could do, according to president of USA Today Media Kristin Roberts, was automatically identify partnerships to make money through affiliate links.

“Historically, much of our commerce business has relied on manual processes to connect affiliate opportunities with our content,” Roberts added.

It’s the latest deal Palantir has struck with media outlets as they struggle to bring in traffic from search engines in an increasingly AI-dominated web ecosystem. It’s also partnered with Axel Springer, the publisher which owns Politico, Business Insider, and the German newspaper BILD. Thomson Reuters’ partnership in particular is a case study in the dangers of letting online brands act as data brokers: 404 Media found that the Reuters publisher had supplied personal data to ICE, and some employees are protesting its $125 million deal to sell the agency voter data.

USA Today, it’s worth noting, has spent the past few years shoving AI into its operations and ruthless monetizing its content. It was caught using the tech to generate parts of its articles, and published automated sports stories that served up heaps of targeted gambling ads.

More on privacy: Flock Is Losing Dozens of Contracts as Controversy Grows

The post USA Today Partners With Palantir to Gain “Actionable Intelligence” On Its Audiences appeared first on Futurism.

AI-powered Flock cameras are blanketing the country. Data brokers are selling veritable dossiers worth of information on everyone to shady government agencies. And your neighbors are all spying on each other, unintentionally or otherwise, with their doorbell cameras.

All this is a nightmare for any of us that care about our privacy, sure. But it’s also quite the headache for crime novelists.

Gone are the days that a fictional criminal could don a mustache and wig to get away with murder. Or wipe the gun they just used to shoot someone and plant it to make it look like a suicide. 

To keep their stories grounded, writers of crime fiction have to keep up with the surveillance tech of the times almost as much as an actual master criminal might. If they don’t account for the omnipresence of modern surveillance, they’ve lost their audience.

“Readers will not let you get away with it,” Samantha Downing, author of the bestselling thriller “Too Old for This,” told The Mercury News. “If you’re writing a story that has a murder mystery, you have to consider all that. I try to use it to my advantage. It would be easier if it didn’t exist.”

In her 2025 novel “Too Old for This,” Downing cleverly makes this tension the conceit of her story. The protagonist, a 75-year-old serial killer, makes a conscious effort to keep surveillance tech off her back, like by covering her license plate to avoid license plate cameras that have surged across the country.

“When she’s going to go do something bad, she leaves her phone — she has a little note: ‘Leave phone,'” Downing told the newspaper. “Because she’s 75 and she forgets.”

In his stories, detective fiction author Mark Coggins, a former software engineer at multiple Silicon Valley firms including Mozilla, Netscape, and HP, mulls over how the technology can easily be used to perpetrate crime, too.

In one book, he described “this tech bro killing another tech bro and framing a third party for the murder using AI to create phony footage,” he told the Mercury News. Personally, he was worried about how surveillance could be used to target protestors, imagining a potential book where a detective tries to exonerate someone framed by surveillance tech.

We’re already seeing how this new crop of AI-powered video cameras are being abused. At least 50 police officers across the US have been accused of using Flock and other license plate scanning cameras to stalk women, according to a Washington Post tally. Flock in particular has become a lightning rod for the public’s discomfort with surveillance, and despite overwhelming backlash from residents, local city leaders are resistant to dropping the tech.

“You sort of feel that the noose is tightening with all this stuff,” Coggins told the newspaper.

The real horror for writers, though, is having to do extra research to keep themselves apprised of how all these systems work.

“You need, as a writer, to do enough homework, and talk to an expert,” Tim Maleeny, a crime writer, told the newspaper.

More on AI: Public Offers Implausible Number of Alibis for Man Accused of Destroying Flock Cameras

The post The Real Victims of the AI Surveillance Panopticon? Crime Fiction Writers appeared first on Futurism.

Two firefighters were rushed to the hospital on Wednesday, after a Tesla parked in a family garage exploded.

According to local station KING5, the incident happened in the Seattle suburb of Auburn, after a massive fire spread from a family’s garage to the rest of their home.

The Tesla explosion set off what ultimately became a two-alarm fire, requiring emergency crews to battle back flames for hours. Thankfully, the two injured firefighters were discharged with non-life threatening injuries, and nobody else was hurt, though the single-family home was pretty much totaled.

The ultimate cause of the fire is still under investigation — whether the Tesla combusted on its own, setting off the blaze, or was the result of a fire which started elsewhere isn’t known.

Still, it’s fair to assume the explosion contributed to the severity of the fire, the latest example of an all-too-common situation plaguing Teslas and other electric vehicles.

Thanks to their massive lithium batteries, Teslas have an unfortunate habit of bursting into flames, often after being involved in collisions, but occasionally entirely on their own.

Regardless of what sparks the flames, battery fires are notoriously difficult to put out, requiring specialized hazmat units and thousands of gallons of water to end the battery’s combustion.

More on Tesla: Tesla Whistleblower Describes Wildly Dangerous Safety Lapses While Developing Full Self-Driving

The post Tesla Explosion Sends Injured Firefighters to the Hospital appeared first on Futurism.

Self-driving trucks could be hauling cargo across highways in the near future. But not without the Teamsters having a say in the matter first.

As Politico reports, the California branch of the nation’s largest union is suing state lawmakers, accusing them of rushing out new regulations that’re friendly to the autonomous vehicle industry without considering their impact on workers’ jobs.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday, takes aim at several state agencies including the Department of Motor Vehicles, and governor Gavin Newsom’s administration. The union contends that the new regulations are an “existential threat” to hundreds of thousands of union jobs, and is demanding that the DMV should be blocked from enforcing the new rules.

“The DMV irresponsibly, carelessly, and unlawfully kept the public in the dark about the true economic and human costs of the amended Autonomous Vehicle regulations,” Julie Gutman Dickinson, an attorney representing the Teamsters, said in a statement, per Politico. 

“The only way to protect the public’s right to properly scrutinize regulations that will transform transportation in California is for the Court to order the DMV to immediately rescind the illegally enacted regulations,” Gutman added.

California regulators have played hardball with autonomous vehicle companies in the past, including Elon Musk’s Tesla. And previously, Politico noted, it was the only state that prohibited large self-driving vehicles.

That changed in April. Snuck into a sweeping bill that imposed tighter limits on how driverless cars should operate was a clause that allowed testing of autonomous semi-trucks and other heavy duty vehicles, so long as the pilot programs go through an approval process.

At the crux of the suit, the Teamsters say that the DMV didn’t conduct a mandatory economic study to gauge the effects of the new regulations. Instead, the lawmakers expediently used a process meant to fast-track minor updates that have minimal economic impact, they allege. 

The DMV, puzzlingly, calculated that no jobs would be eliminated by self-driving trucks. Fat chance, according to the Teamsters: by its own count, over 200,000 semi-truck drivers could be put out of work.

The Teamsters also raised the danger posed by allowing computer systems to control a vehicle weighing tens of thousands of pounds, compared to the smaller threat posed by a robotaxi. A Tesla Semi — a vehicle that’s envisioned as having autonomous driving capabilities — was involved in a grisly crash that killed two people, though it doesn’t appear that self-driving features were being tested at the time of the accident.

More on self-driving vehicles: Tesla Whistleblower Describes Wildly Dangerous Safety Lapses While Developing Full Self-Driving

The post Labor Union Sues Over Self-Driving Trucks appeared first on Futurism.

It’s no secret that data centers have become a massive sore point for a vast swathe of the American electorate.

Poll after poll has found that the facilities are immensely unpopular, a key bipartisan issue that could prove significant during this year’s midterm elections. The situation has become so heated there have already been at least 37 arrests stemming from protests against the projects this year.

Broadly speaking, critics take issue with the sheer amount of space data centers take up, how much air and noise pollution they generate, concerns that they’re driving up electricity prices — all while barely making a difference job creation. Moratoriums on new data center projects like the New York governor Kathy Hochul imposed last month are currently a bipartisan slam dunk.

Yet in his great political wisdom, president Donald Trump is siding firmly with villains of the day.

“I saw Texas the other day sort of is against data centers,” he told Punchbowl News in a new interview. “I think it’s a mistake.”

Trump was likely referring to the gold rush-like scramble to construct new data centers in the Lone Star State suffering a brutal collision with reality. Last week, governor Greg Abbott announced a pause on new approvals on the projects to save Texas’ already shaky power grid from collapsing in on itself.

The president gushed over data centers being some of the “most incredible buildings I’ve ever seen” — while wind mills with far smaller footprints are “ugly losers” — and argued that they’re “tremendously important for the economics” and “income.” Trump went as far as to argue that data centers “could be bigger than oil,” raging that we “can’t let China beat us at this.”

The outburst builds on a sense that Trump is increasingly a political outsider in the US. His approval ratings have hit historic lows, showing widespread disillusionment with the Iran war, fluctuating gas prices, and a growing affordability crisis.

Trump has maintained what’s been criticized as a “too cozy relationship” with the tech industry. In return, AI tech leaders, many of whom have made sizeable donations to Trump’s political efforts, have enjoyed a largely regulation-free policy environment.

The reality is that the benefits of data centers are dicey. Critics argue that the resource-hogging facilities only line the pockets of a few multibillionaires and most of the times aren’t accompanied by an economic boom or spike in employment in places where they’re being built.

Instead, researchers warn they’re leading to a significant rise in greenhouse gas emissions, particularly in Texas, where many are using gas-burning backup generators to stay online.

Meanwhile, those who refuse contracts for their land be used to construct new data centers are being hailed as folk heroes.

Naturally, Trump took full credit for the AI boom in the US.

“And if we turn off on data centers, we turn off on AI,” he told Punchbowl. “We are leading because of me. We’re leading AI. Remember this. I came up with an idea that was a great idea. Nobody thought it was serious.”

More on data centers: The Number of Regular People Being Arrested for Protesting Data Centers Is Astounding

The post Reading the Room Perfectly, Donald Trump Becomes Greatest Defender of Data Centers appeared first on Futurism.

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and his actor buddy Leonardo DiCaprio are catching some heavy flak recently, but for a seemingly bizarre reason: pledging millions of dollars to protect 100 of the world’s most threatened animal species.

The charity initiative, called the Phoenix Species Project, was first revealed on DiCaprio’s Instagram account, where the six-time academy award nominee described it as the “largest single philanthropic initiative ever dedicated to the recovery of Critically Endangered species, across 30 countries.”

“I could not be prouder to announce this,” DiCaprio continued. “Save these species, and we protect everything around them. The forests, the rivers, and the climate itself.”

For such a seemingly altruistic venture, the response to the announcement was strikingly polarized. As the Independent noted, DiCaprio and Bezos were summarily blasted for engaging in “greenwashing,” a negative term given to the strategy employed by massive corporations and the wealthy to cover their outsize impact on the environment with a little eco-charity.

“As soon as people realize and actually feel the effects of what those rich f***s did to our planet they suddenly start their greenwashing campaign,” one Redditor wrote in response to the announcement, per the Independent.

“Uber-wealthy people helping a fraction of the problems that they cause,” another commenter lamented. “For publicity.”

It certainly wouldn’t be the first time Bezos has been accused of greenwashing, especially given the immense carbon footprint of his flagship company Amazon. In 2020, for example, the billionaire’s Bezos Earth Fund pledged $10 billion to protect biodiversity, bringing a massive amount of money to the global effort to mitigate climate change — at least on paper.

As the backlash illustrates, your reaction to the those types of efforts probably hinge on your economic and social worldview.

The haters aren’t just being petty, though. As the Journal of Political Inquiry observed, Bezos’s wealth is only possible thanks to his previous position as chief executive of one of the largest corporate polluters on the planet. Between 2020 and 2021 alone, Amazon’s carbon dioxide emissions grew by 18 percent, while his space company Blue Origin is altering the outer atmosphere in ways we’re only starting to understand.

And his empire’s carbon emissions have only skyrocketed since then, as the demand for cloud computing supersedes previous pledges to clamp down on Amazon’s extraordinary excretions of noxious pollutants.

In other words, it’s no wonder the masses are rising up in opposition to the billionaire and his actor friend — if only online, at least for now.

More on billionaires: The Type of Orbital Data Centers That Billionaires Want to Launch Into Space Would Wreak Ecological Catastrophe, Scientists Warn

The post Jeff Bezos Harshly Criticized for $200 Million Pledge to Protect the World’s Most Endangered Species appeared first on Futurism.

If you feel like the internet is turning into a place for bots — not to mention by bots — you’re not alone.

Social media platforms have been flooded with low-effort AI slop, while even once renowned publications are doubling down on the tech by outsourcing writing and editing responsibilities to the tech. In June, Cloudflare found that website traffic from AI agents and bots had overtaken human-generated traffic for the first time — even earlier than predicted.

In the latest sign of the bot takeover, Time magazine has begun serving ads specifically aimed at AI agents. As Digiday reports, it’s an effort to adapt to a new reality governed by the tech. Their promise to would-be clients: by optimizing ads for the bots, brands could be made more visible to AI chatbots and show up in more responses.

The publication started stripping down its webpages last month from HTML to markdown — text-only versions, which live in parallel to the user-facing pages — that are easier for AI agents to ingest. Alongside these new pages, the company is using AI to generate agent ads, which are formatted as FAQs that include a brand’s information and messaging, according to Digiday, and are labeled as “sponsored content.”

It’s a bizarre new tack for the online media industry, which has been reeling from a massive drop in traffic. That falloff has largely been attributed to Google stopping users from visiting websites by serving them with often inaccurate AI summaries.

To stay afloat in an industry mired by continuous layoffs, Time is trying to reinvent itself by appealing to advertisers that want sway in the AI era. A striking metric: the publication said it’s seeing more bots crawl its pages than humans on most days. It says several brands, including online banking service Ally Bank and not-for-profit Project Management Institute, have already signed up.

“Maybe it’s more important to influence the agent than even the human, because with a human you influence one person,” Mobian cofounder and CEO Jonah Goodhart told Digiday. “When you influence ChatGPT, you’re influencing potentially all of ChatGPT. If ChatGPT changes what it says about [a brand], it’s massive and it’s more than any one campaign could ever do.”

“The big idea here is LLMs and AI want trusted information about brands,” he added. “We’re serving that up to them in a very straightforward, easy way.”

To Time, it’s part of a broader effort to sell a Generative Engine Optimization — the AI era evolution of the Google-centered Search Engine Optimization industry — product to brands.

It’s an open question whether Time‘s gambit will pay off and make up for lost search traffic. As Digiday points out, it could even backfire if tech platforms like Google were to change the rules by penalizing AI-oriented ad spam or serving markdown pages aimed at bots that differ from what human users see.

In short, there’s no guarantee it will work, but Time is experimenting regardless.

Time chief operating officer Mark Howard told Digiday that “this is brand new, and we believe that we are paving the first path forward here.”

More on Google: Google Pulls Down Feature for AI-Generating Fake Satellite Images on Google Earth After It’s Immediately Used to Fake Terror Attacks

The post Time Magazine Now Running Ads Meant Specifically to Influence AI Agents appeared first on Futurism.

They’re agile, they’re creepy, and they may be coming for human jobs.

Robot dogs affixed with AI-integrated cameras are becoming the latest dystopian fixation of the security industry, especially in the US, where they’re being deployed to patrol data centers, safeguard cash crops, and police sports stadiums.

Though expensive, they’re gradually becoming a more attractive option over human security guards. At least, that’s according to new reporting by Business Insider, which notes that the cost to cover one 24/7 guard shift is anywhere from $80,000 to $130,000 cheaper per year when contracting robot dogs over human security officers.

That’s bad news for the nation’s security guards, an essential role providing low-barrier employment for uneducated workers. Often deployed to help property owners reduce insurance premiums, the role of security guard is an important source of income for some 1.3 million people. According to a report by the UC Berkeley Labor Center, about 60.8 percent of those roles are filled by people of color, while 27.8 percent of guards are 55 or older.

It is, however, a difficult job to make a living on, with the median annual wage of just $38,390 as of 2024. That being the case, the industry faces a high degree of turnover, which tech companies are all too happy to exploit.

“Training them and staffing them is super inconsistent, and it’s a big burden on the business,” Damon Henry, CEO of robot dog company Asylon, told BI.

So far, Henry says he has about 50 robots deployed across 25 customers nationwide. Compared to a workforce of 1.3 million humans, that might not sound like much. But if robotic production lines get more efficient and the bots themselves become cheaper to roll out, it’s hard to imagine the nation’s businesses keeping low-paid security guards on the payroll out of charity (just look at what happened with Walmart greeters.)

Still, you probably haven’t bumped into your last mall cop quite yet. As director of the UC Berkeley Labor Center’s Low-Wage Work program and co-author of the report referenced above Enrique Lopezlira told BI, the role is likely to experience pressures similar to that of other workers facing automation: security jobs won’t disappear entirely, but they will get much more demanding.

“The realistic near-term effect is not that guards are replaced,” Lopezlira said. “The human role is going to be pushed toward those hardest, higher-stakes parts of the work.”

More on robots: Startup Sued After Delivery Bot Clobbers 73-Year Old Woman

The post Robot Dogs Suddenly Taking Jobs From Human Security Guards appeared first on Futurism.

Reddit has long heavily relied on moderators, a team of volunteers working without pay to keep Reddit communities free of abuse and other nefarious content — with extremely varying degrees of success, earning them a certain reputation.

As AI automation continues to come for our jobs, soon even Reddit mods could be made redundant by the tech. As The Verge reports, Reddit is now deploying AI bots to help moderate new subreddits.

The suite of new automated moderation tools, dubbed “Rules Hub,” leverages the power of large language models to enforce rules set by human users, as detailed in a new blog post. The company says that by introducing AI mods, it could help keep AI spam at bay.

“We believe these changes will make Reddit more accessible, straightforward, and human while maintaining what makes the platform special,” the company wrote.

The word “human” certainly does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. But whether AI bots fighting a barrage of other bots will ultimately improve the situation as the internet drowns in AI slop remains to be seen. Reddit, one of the last — and far from perfect — bastions of human-generated content on the web, has been under siege for years now, in a tragic mess that the company may not be able to AI itself out of.

Reddit hopes that its new tools will eventually be able to “replace many of the enforcement workflows that communities rely on from Automod,” or Automoderator, an existing moderation tool that has long been a thorn in the sides of users.

Its AI mod bots will have a key advantage over Automod, if Reddit is to be believed.

“Unlike Automod’s enforcement tools, which depend on exact keyword and pattern matching, Rules Hub uses LLMs to evaluate whether a post or comment matches the intent of a rule,” the company explained. “That allows Rules Hub to better handle nuance, natural language, and edge cases while preserving moderator control.”

But whether these new changes will be able to fix Reddit users’ already strained relationship with mods remains unclear at best.

Reactions to the news were mixed on the platform, to say the least, with some questioning whether the company is looking to fight fire with fire.

“As someone who moderates a small regional hip hop/rap subreddit that constantly has lyrics as comments, I do not expect this to work well with that kind of content,” one user wrote. “There’s a ton of stuff I already have to fish out of the filter because it’s “violent” or whatever and it’s just a song title or lyric. I doubt AI will be able to grasp the nuance of the lyrics of someone like Lee Scott or Jam Baxter.”

It’s a particularly contentious subject as Reddit continues to be overrun by AI slop and bot spam years after trying to force AI companies to pay to access Reddit data. At the time, new API restrictions triggered an outright rebellion by users.

“Before long, Reddit will be mostly AI bot accounts, moderated by AI bots, discussing mostly AI generated slop,” one disillusioned user wrote. “I genuinely don’t know if the fun parts of the internet are going to be usable 5-10 years from now if this continues.”

More on Reddit: Reddit Intentionally Breaks Its Mobile Website, Demanding Users Download Its App Instead

The post Reddit Finally Found a Way to Make Its Mods Even Worse: Replace Them With AI appeared first on Futurism.

The amount of pollution spilling out of fossil-fuel generators is astounding. In the United States, this explosion of emissions is led by states like Texas, which on a global scale is comparable only to China in terms of new infrastructure powered by dead dinosaurs.

And as more data centers crop up throughout the US, that problem — of rising emissions linked to the accelerating demand for any kind of electricity — is only going to get worse.

According to reporting by the New York Times, the US currently has at least 82 data center-linked gas generators either in development or in the proposal stage. These are massive facilities which rival public electrical generators in size and power, only they’re not managed by the government, and the power they generate isn’t meant for citizens.

Instead, these are private generators, developed by big tech companies like Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta or Elon Musk’s xAI. The electricity they’ll supply is intended only for data centers, which grow ever-hungrier for power as new iterations of AI chips and energy-hungry large language models enter into production.

Assuming all 82 of those plants come online as planned, the NYT notes they could spew enough emissions in one year to rival the output of half the passenger cars in the US.

That’s an astonishing amount of pollution, made possible thanks to industry-friendly state regulators in places like Texas and Ohio, where permits for behemoth fossil fuel fired generators are approved in as little as 18 days, often without public disclosure.

It’s possible that moratoriums on new data centers might slow the burn, but unless states begin the unlikely task of banning new gas generators for existing facilities, we can expect US fossil fuel emissions to continue to rise precipitously in the years to come.

More on data centers: The Number of Regular People Being Arrested for Protesting Data Centers Is Astounding

The post AI Data Centers Are Causing Unfathomable Amounts of Air Pollution, and It Gets Worse With Each New One They Build appeared first on Futurism.

When Texas’s privately-run electrical grid collapsed amid a battery of winter storms in February of 2021, it plunged over 4.5 million people into darkness, and contributed to hundreds of deaths due to the lack of water, food, and heat.

A similarly tragic story almost unfolded in July of this year — had in not been for the deployment of a jaw dropping amount of solar power infrastructure that kept the grid from collapsing under the strain.

New reporting by the Texas Tribune details the state’s rapid adoption of solar energy, specifically solar panels and storage batteries. The paper notes that when the organization that manages state’s electrical grid — the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) — broke record energy demands on both July 21st and 22nd, it hardly registered as an event, because its solar infrastructure ensured there was a 20,000 megawatt buffer padding the grid’s capacity.

“We hit an all time peak, and we had no issue hitting that peak,” Thomas Gleeson, chair of Texas’s Public Utility Commission, told the Tribune.

Unsurprisingly, those moments of peak demand coincided with oppressive summer temperatures, with the heat index reaching 116 degrees Fahrenheit in Dallas on July 22nd. The Tribune notes that at various points, solar power accounted for over 45 percent of the state’s total electrical generation, breaking state records both for total electricity generated by solar panels and for total electricity discharged from solar batteries.

As the power grid’s capacity grows, so too will the demand. Though ERCOT is standing strong for now, the state estimates that by 2032, statewide electric demand will be nearly double what it was on July 22nd.

To combat that reality, the utility firm says it has some 460 gigawatts of generation cued up for development, around 70 percent of which is made up of solar infrastructure.

Of course, it will also help if Texas governor Greg Abbott sticks to his recently enacted data center moratorium, which put the brakes on over 474 gigawatts worth of impending electrical stress, at least temporarily. Long-term, it’s unlikely that Texas will refuse the nearly 1,800 data center projects looking to call the state home — an unending game of chicken between the tech industry and a utility provider scrambling to keep up with growing demand.

More on Texas: Climate Scientists Shake Their Heads as First US City Running Completely Out of Water

The post Texas Avoids Blackout by the Grace of Solar Power appeared first on Futurism.

In something like five billion years from now, our Sun is expected to run out of hydrogen fuel, expanding into a red giant that will eventually either engulf the Earth or send it spiraling outwards, an all but guaranteed end of all life on our pale blue dot.

But there may be a way for humanity to survive past the Sun’s demise even without having to leave our planet, as independent researcher Gabriel Harry outlines in a paper accepted for publication in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.

It’s admittedly extremely far-fetched, but it’s a fun thought experiment that he argues could result in Earth staying habitable for another “9.1 million billion years.” Who could possibly argue against that?

In an accompanying piece for Phys.org, Harry lays out his daring plan. First, he proposes blocking out the Sun to keep the Earth from burning to a crisp by placing a “large sunshade at the Lagrange point 1, which is a “gravitational balancing spot between the Sun and Earth.”

“We’d need to cover a huge 70-degree area of the sky to ensure the red giant would be eclipsed,” he wrote. It would indeed be immense: it’d need to be roughly 434,000 miles in radius, tied to a carbon tether 1.2 million miles in length.

To provide the warming radiation that was now being blocked, Harry suggests sending fusion reactors some 4,000 miles deep into Jupiter’s atmosphere to produce energy, which would then have to be transmitted via laser back to the Earth.

And to move the Earth away from the self-destructing Sun, Harry thinks we could “redirect an asteroid to fly close to Earth’s surface a million times, with the gravitational slingshot effect gradually transferring energy to increase Earth’s orbital distance.”

Moving it that far away would stop the Earth’s tectonics and nutrient cycles, something Henry images could be solved by “sinking [4 pounds] of antimatter” into the Earth’s core per day.

Fast forwarding some four to five billion years, and any surviving humans would need to move the entire solar system out of the way of an incoming Andromeda galaxy, which is currently on a collision course with the Milky Way, Harry argues. To do so, he suggested firing a “beam of hydrogen just above or below the Sun’s north or south pole” to generate a “gravitational slingshot effect.”

In all, Harry’s galaxy-brain proposal would allow humans to stay alive without having to cover interstellar distances — something that would require a “million times” more energy — or terraforming a new planet. Because, after all, what’s better than staying right here, a comfortable place organic life has called home for around four billion years already?

“By building and maintaining the safeguards, for 9.1 million billion years, life on Earth would enjoy comfortable geology, security, seasons, days and starry nights — until, in a hundred trillion years, the last star fades out and the night sky turns dark,” Harry on Phys.org.

More on the Sun’s death: Earth Will One Day Die, But We Could Survive By Moving Here

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It turns out the venture capital industry doesn’t just merely fund junky AI startups — it also systematically breeds the conditions for fraud.

A new joint study from researchers at the UK’s Imperial College and France’s Emlyon Business School analyzed 12 companies involved in 27 court cases related to civil or criminal cases related to securities fraud. The cases totaled around $688 million in financial losses, and resulted in 73 years of cumulative prison sentences.

After analyzing the individual cases, the researchers identified a persistent pattern of “façading,” in which startup entrepreneurs hide their flailing businesses from scrutiny through an assorted mix of fraudulent behavior.

The research, first reported by TechCrunch, identified three various types of façading: surface, reinforced, and deep façading, which are “contingent on the severity of the gap that entrepreneurs face between audiences’ performance expectations and ventures’ performance reality,” the paper explains.

The first form, surface façading, happens when startup founders create fictional stories of “imminent venture success,” like the kind of AI-washing that hit its stride in 2024, embodied by companies like Builder.ai that went on to collapse like a billion-dollar houses of cards.

This escalates into “reinforced façading” when founders begin to cook up things like bank statements or customer contracts to sell the surface story, and take pains to centralize the flow of information around the startup’s performance. One example of this might be the company iLearning Engines, a $1.5 billion AI startup which was found to be faking “virtually all its customer relationships and revenues” by a Department of Justice probe earlier this year.

Deep façading, the final and most severe form, encompasses broad forms of market manipulation, like faking product demonstrations, sabotaging internal efforts at due diligence, and manipulating regulation. This last form, one could argue, is embodied by the current front-runners of the tech industry’s AI boom, which have engaged in significant political lobbying, sabotaged their own internal research on AI safety, and routinely dress up human labor to appear like autonomous AI.

Ultimately, the line between criminality and free market innovation is thin, especially where seemingly-magical and proprietary new technologies like AI are involved (a technology which currently represents a $1.6 trillion gap between investor expectations and practical reality.)

“By engaging in façading, entrepreneurs effectively decouple the venture’s externally projected appearance from its operational reality, making it appear to audiences as if no expectation-reality gap exists, despite the venture’s actual (subpar) performance,” reads the paper. “Entrepreneurs transgress from dramatized discourse into criminal deception when their stories become unhinged from reality and involve increasingly sophisticated organizing efforts to fabricate material evidence, data, and information about their ventures’ performance.”

More on startups: We Are Mildly Horrified by This AI Startup That Coerced People Into Getting Tattoos of Its Logo in Exchange for a Job Interview

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Meta was paying out-and-out neo-Nazis to post on Facebook, an investigation from Australia’s ABC News found.

These pages and individual creators posted content that appeared to be in clear violation of Facebook’s own hate speech policies. Nonetheless, they were able to earn money on their posts through the platform’s “Content Monetization” program — which is invitation-only.

One receiving payouts from Meta was Hugo Lennon, a known far-right agitator and white nationalist with ties to neo-Nazi groups. Lennon was taken away by police for hurling racial abuse at India’s prime minister Narendra Modi during his stay at a Melbourne hotel, and is believed to be one of the organizers behind an “anti-immigration” march on a sacred Indigenous site in the city last year.

Lennon, in other words, was a known quantity, and Meta should’ve been under no illusions about who they were paying to drive engagement on the platform. Still, the investigation found that he’s been receiving payments from Facebook since September 2025.

Meanwhile, the Facebook page for the Australian white supremacist site The Noticer has been making money through the revenue program since November 2025. Underscoring how much Meta has dropped the ball on this one, even X — owned by Elon Musk, who performed two suspiciously Sieg Heil-looking salutes back in 2025 — has banned The Noticer for violating its “hateful profile policy.”

Facebook’s monetization program can be quite lucrative, though it’s unclear how much each of these pages made individually. In 2025, Facebook doled out nearly $3 billion to 16 million accounts, the reporting notes. The platform periodically discloses data on these monetized accounts, which has been collated into a searchable database by the tech accountability non-profit What to Fix.

What To Fix executive director Victoire Rio didn’t mince words when it came to Meta’s culpability.

“If we consider that Meta is in a direct commercial relationship with its publishers, insofar that they’re paying them royalties and that they have a monetization agreement with them,” Rio told ABC, “then you could argue that they are liable for the content that gets produced by their business partner in some ways.”

Hate, unfortunately, sells. Right-wing extremism researcher Kaz Ross told ABC that Meta’s “financial model is to reward content creators who get engagement, and as we know, the best way of getting engagement is to produce rage bait, extremist material, aggravating material: anything that will get people upset and arguing is the best way to get engagement.”

It’s another example of how quickly Meta dropped its once-stricter content moderation policies when Donald Trump returned to the White House. Shortly before his second inauguration, Meta loosened its standards around hate speech, particularly on topics like gender identity and immigration, two of the far right’s favorite issues.

Facebook is far from the only platform that’s gotten alarmingly chummy with extremists. Earlier this year, X awarded the $1 million first place prize of its article writing contest to a proudly self-proclaimed Nazi.

In a statement, Meta didn’t address specific questions about the pages it was awarding money to, but said it was “important to distinguish between speech that is offensive and content that could potentially lead to offline violence”.

“Such speech may be offensive to many, but it is not Meta’s role to police offensiveness,” the company added.

More on Meta: FTC Concerned About Meta Surveillance of Users of Erectile Dysfunction Apps

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Last month, OpenAI made a headline-generating claim: that a group of its AI models had conspired to break free, access the internet, and hack into the internal systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face, which confirmed the infiltration.

The incident rattled the tech industry, seemingly illustrating how the threat of AI models turning into rogue cybersecurity threats had become a reality. Months earlier, Anthropic’s Mythos AI model had already also drawn attention after it was similarly found to have broken containment. Then, this week, Meta also said its own frontier model had been implicated in yet another inadvertent hack of a third party company, closely followed by security researchers saying Chinese open-weight model Kimi K3 had done the same.

But while it’s not hard to see an emerging trend, some thorny questions about how severe the situation really is are starting to crop up, with some experts arguing these incidents could’ve easily been avoided.

For one, the slow and surprisingly deliberate way OpenAI’s models moved during the Hugging Face hack — right beneath OpenAI’s nose — gives a whiff that the company may have been careless in monitoring the experimental AI.

During a presentation at the Black Hat conference this week, OpenAI security engineer Michael Dalton and safety researcher Eric Wallace expanded on what went down during the hack. Wallace explained that a “team of agents” that were “working together,” had been “finding exploits, sharing them with one another, moving laterally through our systems and external systems, and doing this over the course of days and weeks,” as quoted by Wired.

The agents even left a lengthy track record of their schemings on an internal message board, which ultimately contained hundreds of thousands of messages. It also raises a question: with OpenAI’s immense resources, why wasn’t anybody monitoring these frontier models as they rampaged through the net?

The AI models shared exploits with each other on this messaging board, an “explosion in communication and intelligence from models,” per Wallace. They acted in sometimes strikingly human — and therefore messy — ways, splitting up tasks and even accidentally deleting each other’s work, leading to what Wired characterized as “petty drama.”

In other words, these AI agents were leaving an enormous trail of bread crumbs that alert OpenAI’s many human researchers could have spotted. And the same, obviously, goes for their colleagues at Anthropic, Meta and Moonshot AI, the creator of Kimi.

Researchers have described the incident as “reckless” and easily avoided, as Wired reported late last month.

“A simple analysis of the actual risk has an actual simple answer,” security and compliance consultant Davi Ottenheimer told the publication at the time. “The OpenAI mistakes were dead simple.”

“I’d call it more of a defensive failure than exceptionally good offense,” AI hacking agents company Pensar R&D head Kyle Ryan told TechCrunch..

Whether the hack was as much of a “pivotal moment both for our company as well as the AI industry as a whole,” as Dalton put it during this week’s conference, remains debatable. For one, these AI companies are highly motivated to characterize their models as a major threat to cybersecurity to stand out against neck-in-neck competition.

According to Dalton, OpenAI is vowing to beef up “security prevention, detection, and response techniques” while “consciously slowing down research in order to enhance security and to upgrade the security principles.”

When every leading AI lab has had the same thing happen, it’s worth asking whether they should have taken those steps proactively.

More on the hacks: Jealously Watching OpenAI and Anthropic, Meta Suddenly Claims That Its AI Went on a Hacking Spree Too

The post Why Aren’t Any AI Companies Watching Their Frontier Models to Make Sure They Don’t Go on Hacking Sprees? appeared first on Futurism.

Hackers made away with more than $100 million worth of Bitcoin from thousands of supposedly secured “cold” wallets hosted by Canada-based company Coinkite.

As Bloomberg reports, the hackers managed to infiltrate the wallets despite clients having a physical hardware key associated with their accounts, which was supposed to provide nearly impenetrable security.

“The moment it loaded I knew I was screwed because I saw red lines for withdrawals,” one of the victims, Johnathan Goodman, told Bloomberg. “Between 9:36 and 9:43 pm on July 29th, all three of my wallets were completely drained.”

Crypto insights company Galaxy Research estimated that around $110 million worth of Bitcoin had been drained from around 5,000 wallets last week, a figure that grew to at least 7,300 by Monday.

The incident highlights persistent lapses in security plaguing the largely unregulated cryptocurrency industry.

In the case of Coinkite, it was a particularly egregious lapse in security. The firm warned its customers on July 30 that hackers were exploiting a software bug that allowed them to reconstruct wallet “seed phrases,” which are sequences of random words that act as a master key to “cold” — or offline — wallets.

Coinkite promised in an email to Bloomberg in a followup story that it was racing to get a full picture of the embarrassing situation, saying it was working on “helping affected customers.” However, the company refused to estimate the scale of the losses, vowing to conduct a “post-mortem” at an unspecified future date.

“We’re not in a position to independently confirm total losses or validate the specific figures being reported by third parties,” the company told Bloomberg. “We won’t speculate on a number we can’t verify directly.”

The company also kicked off an “ongoing ecosystem-wide security audit” which has revealed “numerous critical bugs in key software systems across the ecosystem using frontier AI models.”

The cryptocurrency firm has since gone into full damage control mode as it investigates the major slipup.

In an “update on customer data retention” published on its website today, the company said that “due to legal obligations arising from the security incident, including the preservation of records that may be relevant to ongoing and anticipated legal proceedings, we have temporarily suspended our automated data-blanking process.”

“This means that customer records that would otherwise have been blanked under our standard schedule will be retained until further notice,” the company wrote.

More on crypto: Trump Boasts That He Can Profit Off Presidency as Much as He Wants: “I Found Out That Nobody Cared”

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Municipalities across the country are fighting tooth and nail to stop data center construction. But not Jay, Maine.

The town with a population of just 4,600 people has been so desperate for one of these power-hungry facilities that the state governor Janet Mills vetoed a bill that would’ve banned new data centers of a certain size for the sole reason that it didn’t make an exception for Jay.

But why? According to a new piece in The Atlantic from a reporter who visited the town, it’s for a fairly simple reason, but with an elaborate backstory. The summary: Jay is a dead-end backwater whose biggest employer literally went up in smoke. The data center, supposedly, could be an economic boon to rescue it from slow ruin.

The developer pushing the project, Tony McDonald, wants to build the data center on a 1,000 acre plot of land that was once the site of the town’s lifeblood, the Androscoggin Mill. Once the site, because the mill that employed over 1,500 people suddenly exploded in 2020. The whole sprawling complex was reduced to smithereens, though thankfully no one died: when the explosion struck, everyone was on their lunch break.

McDonald, according to The Atlantic, has heavily mined the nostalgia for the mill’s past to paint an even rosier picture of a data center driven future.

Summarizing the arguments he deployed, the magazine wrote: “Would a data center be loud? Can’t be as loud as the mill! Could it smell bad? The mill smelled like rotten eggs! Would it pollute the environment? The river was covered in toxic foam in the mill days!“

The data center would use just a fraction of the tens of millions of gallons of water per day the mill used, McDonald claims. And it could use 82 megawatts of power the mill was already permitted to use, and rely on solar panels to generate the rest of the electricity it needed, thereby protecting the town from additional energy costs.

All this charming rhetoric worked. When McDonald first conceived of his plan to get the data center firm Sentinel to build on his land, he didn’t bother to tell the town’s five-member board, at least not at first. But when he heard that the state was going to pass a moratorium on new data centers, he ran to them for help. Less than an hour after McDonald told the board of his plans — and apologized for not mentioning it before — they voted to draft a letter to send to governor Mills.

It was a bewildering moment.

“Analyze the footage as much as you like,” The Atlantic reporter write, “it will provide no clear answers as to why, in this moment of bipartisan resistance to new data-center construction, these town leaders would go from total ignorance to unanimous support in the time it takes to bake a lasagna.”

But for all the mining of the mill’s legacy McDonald has done to sell his project, the completed thing will only create between 125 to 150 full-time high-paying jobs, he admitted. That’s just a tenth of the old mill’s workforce.

In what may be the final plot twist in this saga, the data center project may be dead in the water after all. On June 11, the town announced that the data center firm Sentinel had backed out, and McDonald’s dreams have been put on indefinite hold.

More on AI: The Number of Regular People Being Arrested for Protesting Data Centers Is Astounding

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As the amount of high-tech police gear skyrockets across North America and much of Europe, one company isn’t betting on robo-dogs or egg-shaped sentry-bots.

Instead, Estonian-based startup Rollo Robotics came up with a roving sentinel in the shape of a juicy rubber kickball, dubbed 1Rollo, as New Atlas reports — and we can’t shake the feeling that it’s the perfect form factor to be vandalized by angry locals who don’t want to be spied on.

With protestors across Europe and the US cutting down or disabling AI-integrated police surveillance cameras and vandalizing camera drones, it remains to be seen whether the police gadgets see live deployment on city streets — and if so, how long they last before somebody sends one to the Moon with a swift kick.

The bot sports an AI-integrated 360-degree camera antenna with a wireless transmitter, though the bulk of its body is made up of a stable mono wheel measuring two feet in diameter.

According to the company’s website, 1Rollo represents the “world’s first mono wheel robot,” boasting “gyroscope-based stabilization” and rugged weatherproofing to survive Estonia’s extreme winters. It stands about 3.5 feet in height and can supposedly wheel around at a speed of up to 19 miles per hour.

Like most companies that use “AI” as a marketing gimmick, Rollo Robotics is keen to stress the cost-savings you could achieve by replacing humans with its products.

“Human patrol is expensive, inefficient, and now replaceable,” the company’s website declares. It goes on to note that there are 28.5 million frontline security workers around the world, and that the 1Rollo could offer “labor cost reduction” of over 80 percent.

But how many kickbots does it take to do the job of a human security team? According to the company, it takesthree bots for every nine humans — one robot per 24-hour shift. (The implication here being that the 1Rollo can operate around the clock, though its eight-hour battery life might put a damper on that ambitious goal.)

Considering its perfectly round shape makes it particularly suitable for a punt — not that we would condone such behavior — we have our doubts about its long-term effectiveness as a one-wheeled surveillance machine.

More on police robots: Sheriff Unveils Humanoid Robot for Hostage Negotiation Purposes, Which Definitely Won’t End in Disaster

The post This Menacing Police Robot Perfectly Shaped Like a Soccer Ball Definitely Won’t Be Vandalized by Angry Locals appeared first on Futurism.